Friday, May 06, 2016

I think he may be able to drive away from that.... lucky stupid bastard should buy a lotto ticket before his guardian angel rubs out of patience though, because I don't know how he kept from flipping that or plowing through those trees

Sshortcuts are more than a source of pride to cabdrivers: they're trade secrets, gleaned from years behind the wheel. As onetime taxi hack and former New York City Department of Transportation commissioner Sam Schwartz — the man who invented the term gridlock — boasted, "By the time I was in my twenties, I knew a thousand different shortcuts and work-arounds for every street in New York's five boroughs."

But the advantage held by those grizzled street warriors is quickly dying, killed off by a mass of users — 50 million, at the last publicly released count — who provide invaluable data points simply by driving, and flagging speed traps and mark traffic jams.

It's Waze, the Google-owned crowdsourcing navigation app that uses the real-time speeds of its users to determine the best driving routes. For all the hypothetical chatter about the world-changing import of self-driving cars, arguably nothing has had a bigger impact on what's actually happening on the roads than this simple app.

This is where the power of the masses is incontrovertible. Waze flags a jam when the free-flow speed for Wazers, as its users are known and whose GPS is being pinged once a second, drops below a certain percentage (based on seven years of historical data).

Ken Kesey managed to see the 1964 New York World's Fair site under construction, but needed to return to New York the following year for the publication party for a novel and hoped to use the occasion to visit the Fair after it opened.

This plan gradually grew into an ambitious scheme to bring along a group of friends and turn their adventures into a road movie, taking inspiration from Jack Kerouac's On the Road. As more Pranksters volunteered for the trip they soon realized they had outgrown Kesey's station wagon, so Kesey bought a retired yellow school bus for $1,250

In 1964, when Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters drove from California to New York, the vehicle was already 25 years old. After its cross-country escapades, the bus sat in Kesey's farm in Oregon's Willamette Valley.

The cross-country trip of Further led to a number of psychedelic buses appearing in popular media over the next few years, including in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour (film) (1967)
The Who released Magic Bus (song) with its lyric "Further further further further..."
and the Partridge Family TV show (1970)
and the Muppets Electric Mayhem trippy painted bus

(following excerpts from a 2006 article)
For some 15 years, the 1939 International bus dubbed “Further” has rusted away in a swamp on the Kesey family’s Willamette Valley farm, out of sight if not out of mind, more memory than monument.

That is where Ken Kesey — author of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and hero of a generation that vowed to drop out and tune in with the help of LSD — intended it to stay after firing up a new bus in 1990.

But four years after his death, a Hollywood restaurateur has persuaded the family to resurrect the old bus so it can help tell the story of Kesey, the Merry Pranksters and the psychedelic 1960s.

“One of the things that is really optimistic for me is it’s got full air in the tires from Cassady,” says Kesey, referring to Neal Cassady, who was the wheelman in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” and drove Further on that first trip. “Honestly, if the tires had been flat, I would have said, ‘Just leave it there.”’

The body is badly rusted. The paint is peeled. The roof leaks. The engine, not original, and transmission have both been underwater. The original bunk beds and refrigerator are gone, but the driver’s seat remains.

Bob Santelli, artistic director of the Experience Music Project in Seattle: “I consider the bus to be one of the most important icons of the ’60s Counter Culture,” says Santelli. “Inside that bus occurred many of the things the counter culture was all about, from a revolutionary perspective. That is mobility, freedom to be on the move, and to react to situations and create situations to react to, drug use and experimenting with drugs, and the importance of music in a cultural revolution.”

Fresh from the stunning success of “Cuckoo’s Nest,” Kesey wanted to drive to New York City for the 1964 World’s Fair and a coming-out party for his new book, “Sometimes a Great Notion,” making a movie along the way.

Fresh from the stunning success of “Cuckoo’s Nest,” Ken Kesey bought the bus for $1,250 from Andre Hobson in Atherton, Calif., a sales engineer who had outfitted it with bunks, a bathroom and a kitchen to take his 11 kids on vacation

Kesey’s home in the Santa Cruz Mountains south of San Francisco, they installed a sound system, a generator on the back and went wild with the paint. Artist Roy Sebern painted the word “Furthur” on the destination placard as a kind of one-word poem and inspiration to keep going whenever the bus broke down. It wasn’t until much later that he found out he had misspelled it. Just as the bus was constantly being repainted, somewhere along the line the Further sign was corrected.

The wildly painted bus got stopped by the police, but with their short haircuts and preppy clothes, the Pranksters were never arrested.

The film and tape rolled constantly, but when they got back to La Honda, they could never get the two to synchronize. Author Tom Wolfe used the material for his book, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” but the movie lay dormant until 2000, when a digital editing machine made it possible and Kesey issued, “Intrepid Traveler and His Merry Band of Pranksters Look for A Kool Place.”

After one last trip, to Woodstock, N.Y., in 1969, Kesey put the bus out to pasture, where it served as a dugout for softball games. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., expressed some interest in restoring the bus, but Kesey would never let it go.

The idea of a 50 year anniversary cross country trip was nixed when they finally admitted that the idea of fixing it up was nuts, it's too far rusted, and the cost of trying for a restoration is around a half a million dollars. Never going to happen. They pulled it out of the swamp in 2005... and in 10 years did literally nothing, and raised no money

this 1928 Buick was very interesting as it started out as a 4 door sedan, but a local farmer had converted it into a pickup. The thing that was unique about this car was that the farmer had scribed every load of grain etc. he must have hauled in it all over the body with a nail through the paint. It was unbelievable the dates and loads that were in the right time frame all over this old Buick.

This was a common way to prevent riverbank erosion from flood waters, and these stacks of crushed junkyard cars are also known as riprap. America has them everywhere, Google Image search "cars on the river bank" and you'll see what a polluted river country we are. The Rio Grande, the Yellowstone River

This car began life as a dealer demonstrator and occasional dealer-backed competition car in Framingham, Massachusetts, before being sold to a local customer who drove it for a decade, putting on 55,000 miles. He never told anyone about it, and drove it into storage in 1976.

The car is in marvelous time-capsule condition and includes its five original Cragar Shelby mag wheels as well as every service receipt and document from new, including the bill of sale, original handbook and Shelby literature.
Even more fascinating is that this car is not found on the Shelby America register since the owner never told anyone about it,

the 15-year-old dirt of Sam Boyd Stadium, where veteran operators of front-end loaders, bulldozers and mini-dozers called skid steers maneuvered their earth-moving machines like ballerinas to create the obstacle bump-filled three-dimensional motorcycle course for the Monster Energy Supercross Finals make up the sport’s playing field, so to speak.

Feld Motor Sports, based in Aurora, Ill., stores 550 truck loads of the dirt right outside Sam Boyd Stadium, where it’s used for other Feld events, such as the Monster Jam World Finals.

The same dirt is used time after time for Feld sport events at Sam Boyd Stadium. The dirt for the Monster Jam event is not removed from the stadium between the Supercross Finals and the Monster Jam Finals, but instead stored in the center of the venue because the stadium that’s managed by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

It takes trucks two days to transfer the dirt from outside the stadium to inside the venue, so arranging the schedule for both dirt track events, cuts considerable time and cost from set up for the 2nd event.

Immediately after the Monster Jam ends, crews begin pushing the dirt into a two-story-tall mound in the center of the stadium field to store it for preparation of tilling it and adding water to keep it soft, moist and usable for the Supercross, Prater said.

In 2006, crews did not move the dirt into the center of the stadium after the monster truck event. So, when the Supercross workers showed up a few weeks later to begin forming the dirt course in the shapes of table tops and camelback-like mogul bumps, they found dirt that “had settled like brick,” Prater said.

Nathan Swartzendruber, the event paddock manager, said an eight-inch base of dirt sits on two layers of plastic over the UNLV football field. Feld hires a company called Dirt Wurx, based in Monroe, N.Y. outside New York City, to move the dirt and set up the course.

The former employee, Marion Williams, was carrying a shotgun and a pistol when he walked into the business just before 9 a.m.

Sheriff Ron Hickman said the former employee drove to the West Harris County business, parked in front and walked inside with both weapons.

An employee watched the gunman enter and heard him say, “You ruined my life,” The Williams then opened fire with the shotgun, killing Mike Dawid, his former supervisor, and injuring two other employees, before taking his own life with the pistol.

Knight Transportation is one of the largest trucking companies in the country, with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and roughly 5,000 employees in 20 states.

Wednesday, May 04, 2016

He built a stock-bore 445hp small-block and 540hp big-block that contained “optional heavy-duty parts” that were production components available from Chevy, which they had to be for eligibility. Both used solid lifters. Muncie four-speeds and Positraction 12-bolt rearends suspended from stock leaf springs completed the drivetrain.

The three Camaros he built were said to be Z/28s, though they may have started out as pedestrian Camaros with Z/28 markings. Smokey stressed that he deviated from stock by only adding rollbars, magnesium American Racing wheels, and 10.00-15 rayon racing tires.

On their way to Bonneville, Smokey called HOT ROD’s Jim McFarland to come meet him at Riverside Raceway, where the Bud Moore Mercury Cougar team was practicing for the upcoming Mission Bell 250. Smokey flat towed one of the Camaros for this detour. When he got there somehow he was allowed to unload the Camaro at the track, where this shot was taken. With Lloyd Ruby driving they broke the Trans-Am qualifying record.

Smokey was immediately kicked out of Riverside, with a big smile on his face.

At Bonneville in October 1967, a 10-mile course was marked off on the salt, and with driver Mickey Thompson and stock car drivers Curtis Turner, Bunkie Blackburn, and Johnny Patterson, they spent 12 days breaking hundreds of flying-mile records